Factory Girls

Cultural technology and the making of K-pop.

Girls’ Generation—Tiffany, Yoona, Sooyoung, Taeyeon, Hyoyeon, Sunny, Seohyun, Yuri, and Jessica—the dominant girl group in Asia, is being positioned to conquer the West as well.Credit Photographs by Matthew Niederhauser / Institute

It was five o’clock on a Sunday in May, two hours before showtime, but already thousands of K-pop fans had flooded the concrete playa outside the Honda Center, a large arena in Anaheim, California. Tonight’s performers were among the biggest pop groups in South Korea—SHINee, f(x), Super Junior, EXO, TVXQ!, and Girls’ Generation. In the United States, Korean pop music exists almost exclusively on YouTube, in videos like “Gangnam Style,” by Park Jae-sang, the rapper known as PSY, which recently went viral. The Honda Center show was a rare chance for K-pop fans to see the “idols,” as the performers are called, in the flesh.

K-pop is an East-West mash-up. The performers are mostly Korean, and their mesmerizing synchronized dance moves, accompanied by a complex telegraphy of winks and hand gestures, have an Asian flavor, but the music sounds Western: hip-hop verses, Euro-pop choruses, rapping, and dubstep breaks. K-pop has become a fixture of pop charts not only in Korea but throughout Asia, including Japan—the world’s second-biggest music market, after the U.S.—and Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. South Korea, a country of less than fifty million, somehow figured out how to make pop hits for more than a billion and a half other Asians, contributing two billion dollars a year to Korea’s economy, according to the BBC. K-pop concerts in Hong Kong and on mainland China are already lucrative, and no country is better positioned to sell recorded music in China, a potentially enormous market, should its endemic piracy be stamped out. Yet, despite K-pop’s prominence in Asia, until recently few in the United States had heard of it. SMTown World Tour III, named for S.M. Entertainment, the Korean music company that is sponsoring the global tour, is hoping to change things, through a unique system of “cultural technology.”

Outside the arena, clusters of fans were enacting dance covers: copies of their favorite idol groups’ moves. (PSY’s horse-riding dance, from “Gangnam Style,” may be the Macarena of the moment.) People carried light sticks and bunches of balloons, whose colors signified allegiance to one or another idol group. The crowd was older than I’d expected, and the ambience felt more like a video-game convention than like a pop concert. About three out of four people were Asian-American, but there were also Caucasians of all ages, and a number of black women.

Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.

“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”

I had arranged to meet Toth because somewhere between my tenth viewing of the Girls’ video “Mr. Taxi” and my twentieth click on “Gee” it occurred to me that I might not know how much I loved these girls, either. “Listen, boy,” Tiffany coos at the outset of “Gee.” “It’s my first love story.” And then she tilts her head to the side and flashes her eye smile—the precise crinkle in the outer corner that texts her love straight 2U. Why was watching “Mr. Taxi” such pure audiovisual pleasure? Why did my body feel lighter in the chair? It wasn’t the music—bright, candy-cane-sweet sounds, like aural Day-Glo—and, while the dancing was wonderfully precise, the choreography had a schematic quality.

“They look like cheerleaders,” my twenty-one-year-old niece hissed over my shoulder one day as I was watching “Gee” again. “Uncle Pervy!”

No, it was nothing like that. For pervy, try the J-pop group AKB48, a Japanese girl ensemble, with scores of members, who, affecting a schoolgirls-in-lingerie look in their video “Heavy Rotation,” pillow-fight, kiss, and share heart-shaped cookies mouth to mouth. Girls’ Generation is a group of preppy-looking young women in skinny trousers. When they wear hot pants, it’s to display the gams, not the glutes.

“They take the love the fans feel for them, and they return it to the fans,” Toth told me. “When you see them onstage, it’s like they’ve come to see you.”

I must have looked skeptical.

“Just wait,” he said. “You’ll see.”

“Hallyu” is the term that Asians use to describe the tsunami of South Korean culture that began flooding their countries at the turn of the twenty-first century. Korean TV dramas and, to a lesser extent, Korean films have, along with Korean pop music, become staples in markets formerly dominated by Japan and Hong Kong. According to the pop-culture scholar Sung Sang-yeon, Korean TV producers established themselves during the Asian economic crisis of the late nineties, offering programming that was cheaper than the shows being made in Japan and Hong Kong and of higher quality than most other Asian countries could produce themselves. While the Korean singers and actors are young and the settings are often contemporary, their themes embody traditional values of family, friendship, and romantic love.

The Korean government has promoted hallyu, using it as a form of “soft power,” by making South Korea the Hollywood of Asia. Hallyu has erased South Korea’s regional reputation as a brutish emerging industrial nation where everything smelled of garlic and kimchee, and replaced it with images of prosperous, cosmopolitan life. Thanks to mini-series such as “Winter Sonata,” a 2002 romantic drama that was a huge hit throughout Asia, middle-aged Japanese women now swoon over Korean men, while complaining about the “grass-eating”—that is, lacking in virility—males of Japan. Korean ancestry used to be a stigma in Japan; now it’s trendy. At home, K-drama’s success has brought tourists from all over Asia to visit the sites depicted on the screen.

Like K-drama, K-pop is a blend not just of Western and traditional but of new and old. The music features lush soundscapes made with the latest synths and urban beats. The hooks are often sung in English, and sometimes suggest a dance move: steering in “Mr. Taxi”; butt-shaking in “Bubble Pop.” The videos feature extravagant sets and big production numbers reminiscent of early Madonna videos, while the music sometimes sounds like New Jack Swing—the late-eighties dance music created by the American producer and songwriter Teddy Riley and popularized by Michael and Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men, and Bobby Brown, among others. The girls’ sexy but demure style recalls groups of the early sixties—the Shirelles, the Crystals, and the Ronettes. Neither the boys’ nor the girls’ lyrics or videos generally refer to sex, drinking, or clubbing—the great themes of Western hit-makers. Indeed, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, a state agency, endeavors to keep minors from hearing or seeing K-pop songs and videos that make reference to clubbing. I was in Seoul last spring when Lady Gaga performed at the Olympic Stadium, and kids under the age of eighteen were barred from the show. (Some artists push the envelope. For example, the K-pop idol Rain’s song “Rainism” detailed the activities of his “magic stick”; the song was later revised. Many artists censor themselves, in order to reach the broadest possible audience.)

In Seoul, you can feel K-pop all around you. There is the constant presence of the idols on billboards and in display ads. Life-size cutouts of idols greet you at the entrances of the big department stores. On the streets and in the subways you see echoes of the idols’ faces. (On one occasion, in a hotel lobby, I strode up to what I thought was a cutout of a K-pop idol, only to find that it was a real woman, who frowned and moved away.) In Gangnam, the ritzy shopping district on the south side of the Han River, the architecture is as showy as the idols themselves.

Three music agencies dominate the K-pop industry. S.M. Entertainment is the largest, followed by J.Y.P. Entertainment and Y.G. Entertainment. (The initials stand for the names of the agencies’ founders, all of whom are former musicians or dancers: Lee Soo-man, Park Jin-young, and Yang “Goon” Hyun-suk, respectively.) The agencies act as manager, agent, and promoter, controlling every aspect of an idol’s career: record sales, concerts, publishing, endorsements, and TV appearances. S.M. and J.Y.P. are in Gangnam, and there are always groups of young girls, many of them Japanese, in the streets outside, hoping for a glimpse of an idol or two (even though the idols generally move anonymously through the city, in minivans with tinted windows). Both sets of offices are surprisingly shabby inside, with cramped studios and worn-looking décor. Y.G., across the river, has much more lavish facilities, including around a dozen state-of-the-art recording studios and a staff of sixteen in-house producers, among them Teddy Park, who wrote “Fantastic Baby,” for BIGBANG, and most of the music for 2NE1, Y.G.’s two most popular groups.

At J.Y.P., I briefly met Park Jin-young, a tall, athletic forty-year-old who was educated in the U.S. He was in the agency’s training facility. Dressed in workout clothes, he was in the middle of a session with some of the trainees, and he couldn’t stop to talk; he disappeared into a dance studio, outside of which there was a pile of kids’ shoes. However, I was able to chat with the five Wonder Girls, the agency’s most successful girl group. In their video “Nobody,” they wear shimmering dresses and bouffant hairdos—Korea’s answer to the Supremes. Out of costume and without makeup, they were almost unrecognizable. They sat at a conference table, with Sohee, who looked very tired, in the middle. We talked a lot about jet lag. Sunye, sitting on Sohee’s left, looked at the clock on the wall, which read 5 P.M. “This time of day is the worst!” she declared.

The agencies recruit twelve-to-nineteen-year-olds from around the world, through both open auditions and a network of scouts. Girls’ Generation, the dominant girl group in recent years, has two members, Tiffany and Jessica, who were born and reared in California. (Native English- or Chinese-speaking boys and girls, usually of Korean origin, are highly prized.) Tiffany, who was born in San Francisco and grew up in Los Angeles, was recruited at fifteen, while auditioning for a talent show, and brought to Seoul, where she trained in the idol-making system. Jessica, who was born in the same hospital as Tiffany, was discovered in Seoul at twelve. “I didn’t really audition,” she told me. “I went to Korea to meet my dad’s side of the family, and I was shopping, and one of the agents saw me, and picked me and my sister together.” Her sister, Krystal, was seven at the time; now she’s a member of the group f(x). In Seoul, both Tiffany and Jessica attended an international school by day; after school, they reported to S.M., where they trained until ten, and then they had to do homework. Jessica’s training lasted for seven years.

In addition to singing and dancing, the idols study acting and foreign languages—Japanese, Chinese, and English. They also receive media coaching and are readied for the intense scrutiny they will receive on the Internet from the “netizens” of Korea, the most wired country on earth. (“Netizens Love Seohyun’s Aegyo Mark” declared a recent headline from the K-pop Web site Soompi, regarding the small beauty dot to the left of the singer’s eye.) Unless you’re the Jonas Brothers or Taylor Swift, public drunkenness, brawling, and serial misbehavior can often enhance an artist’s reputation in the American pop scene; in Korea, a rumored sex tape or a positive test for marijuana can derail a career. On average, only one in ten trainees makes it all the way to a début.

The groups are put together by the heads of the agencies, according to an alchemy of individual and collective qualities. “The members of a group shouldn’t be completely alike and indistinguishable,” Melody Kim, a community manager at Soompi, told me, “but they should be complementary enough so that together they form a really great, cohesive whole.” Groups début on one of the many musical-variety shows that play on Korean TV almost nightly. I went to the taping of one, for the Mnet musical program “M! Countdown,” where new and established groups perform their latest songs and the audience votes for its favorites; I was reminded of the days when MTV actually featured music. If idols are successful, they are often expected to churn out a full album every eighteen months or so and a five-song mini album each year. The charts change rapidly, and, because youth and novelty are at such a premium, established groups usually don’t last long: five years is the average shelf life of an idol. (Some idols extend their careers by acting in K-dramas.) New groups appear regularly; in 2011, about sixty groups made débuts, an unprecedented number. Only a fraction are likely to last; most will fade away after a couple of songs.

In its early years, the Korean Wave didn’t feel as imperialistic to other Asians as a Chinese wave might have. But more recently, in Japan and in some parts of China, there has been a backlash from a loud minority, which may be one reason that the agencies are promoting their groups more assiduously in the West. This year, China passed a law limiting the amount of foreign programming that can be shown on Chinese TV. Hallyu, far from seeming like a benign export from a nonthreatening country, is now commonly described as an “invasion,” as though it were a sort of mental Asian carp that is clogging up the minds of the young.

Good looks are a K-pop artist’s stock-in-trade. Although some of the idols are musicians, K-pop artists rarely play instruments onstage. Where K-pop stars excel is in sheer physical beauty. Their faces, chiselled, sculpted, and tapering to a sharp point at the chin, Na’vi style, look strikingly different from the flat, round faces of most Koreans. Some were born with this bone structure, no doubt, but many can look this way only with the help of plastic surgery. Korea is by far the world leader in procedures per capita, according to The Economist. Double-fold-eyelid surgery, which makes eyes look more Western, is a popular reward for children who get good marks on school exams. The popularity of the K-pop idols has also brought Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean “medical tourists” to Seoul to have their faces altered to look more like the Korean stars. Some hotels have partnered with hospitals so that guests can have in-house procedures; the Ritz-Carlton Seoul, for example, offers an eighty-eight-thousand-dollar “anti-aging beauty package.” Women come to have their cheekbones shaved down and undergo “double jaw surgery,” in which the upper and lower jawbones are cracked apart and repositioned, to give the whole skull a more tapered look.

These Grand Guignol images were on my mind in Anaheim, at the meet-the-idols press briefing before the show, which took place in a long, narrow room on the third floor of the Honda Center. Two idols from each of the six groups who were performing filed in. They sat on high stools on a small raised platform. Each was wearing one of the many different costumes that he or she would sport in the course of the four-hour show. The boys’ faces were as pancaked and painted as the girls’, and their hair was even more elaborately moussed, gelled, and dyed, in blond and butterscotch hues. Some guys wore high-waisted jackets with loose harem pants or jodhpurs, circus-ringmaster style; others wore white cutaways with high, stiff collars and black ties, like dream prom dates. They were more androgynous than Ziggy Stardust. The girls wore gold hot pants or short skirts, sparkly tops, and lace-up leather boots. Everyone looked very serious.

Once the idols were seated, a woman appeared with a stack of white gym towels. She gave one to each of the female idols, who arranged it atop her exposed thighs, as a makeshift modesty panel. I sat opposite Sooyoung, of Girls’ Generation, a willowy brunette. She seemed distant and frosty, like a figurine in a glass case.

S.M. had prepared questions for the idols, and they were read out loud, in English and Korean, by the S.M. company man who ran the proceedings. The first question, for the two members of the Girls, was: “Every time you visit the States it seems like you receive crazy love and support. Can you feel it? Can you explain the wonderful reception your fans have given you?”

The same question was put, in slightly different forms, to all the groups. The two representatives of Super Junior, a twelve-member boy group, were asked, “How do you always manage to have an explosive reaction from your fans worldwide? What’s your secret?”

One of the members hazarded a guess. “Maybe it is because of our great good looks?”

Lee Soo-man, S.M.’s founder—people in the company refer to him as Chairman Lee—is K-pop’s master architect. Lee retired as the agency’s C.E.O. in 2010, but he still takes a hand in forming the trainees into idol groups, including S.M.’s newest one, EXO. The group has twelve boys, six of them Korean speakers who live in Seoul (EXO-K) and six Mandarin speakers, who live in China (EXO-M). The two “subgroups” release songs at the same time in their respective countries and languages, and promote them simultaneously, thereby achieving “perfect localization,” as Lee calls it. “It may be a Chinese artist or a Chinese company, but what matters in the end is the fact that it was made by our cultural technology,” he has said. “We are preparing for the next biggest market in the world, and the goal is to produce the biggest stars in the world.” But, while S.M. gets credit for inventing the factory system, its idol groups are seen by some as being too robotic to make it in the West. Y.G. is significantly smaller than S.M. in terms of revenue, but it has a reputation as an agency that allows artists like PSY a kind of creative freedom they would not enjoy at S.M.

Lee was born in Seoul in 1952, during the Korean War. He grew up listening to his mother play classical piano. At the time, the dominant Korean pop genre was trot (an abbreviation of “foxtrot”), pronounced “teuroteu.” Trot borrowed from Western music and from Japanese popular songs, a legacy of the Japanese occupation, from 1910 to 1945. It blended these influences with a distinctively Korean singing style called p’ansori. Lee, however, immersed himself in American folk and Korean rock music, which started on U.S. Army bases and was popularized by the guitarist and singer Shin Joong-hyun, in the sixties. Long before K-pop came along, Korean musicians were masters at combining Western influences with traditional singing and dancing styles.

Lee made his name as a folksinger, and toward the end of the decade formed a short-lived hard-rock band called Lee Soo-man and the 365 Days. He also became a well-known d.j. and the host of televised music and variety shows. Mark Russell, who interviewed Lee for his 2008 book, “Pop Goes Korea,” writes that the Korean government cracked down on the music scene, arresting and imprisoning several prominent musicians on pot charges. When a military coup installed Chun Doo-hwan as President, in 1980, Lee’s radio and TV shows were cancelled.

Lee moved to the U.S., where he pursued a master’s degree in computer engineering at California State University, in Northridge. He became fascinated with the music videos that were a staple of programming on the newly launched MTV. If there is a single video from the eighties that captures many of the elements that later resurfaced in K-pop, it is Bobby Brown’s 1988 hit “My Prerogative,” with its triplet swing on the sixteenth note, a signature of New Jack Swing. Brown’s dance moves—a swagger in the hips, combined with tight spins that are echoed by backing dancers—also found their way into K-pop’s DNA.

In 1985, Lee received his degree, and, he told Russell, he returned home determined to “replicate U.S. entertainment in Korea.” Increasing prosperity, marked by the arrival of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, helped bring market-oriented democracy to South Korea and a general loosening of restrictions on the media. Around this time, Koreans coming back to Seoul from the U.S. brought the rhythms of rap and hip-hop, sung in Korean. The consonant nature of the language, with its abundance of ka and ta sounds, lent a hard-edged quality to the raps. In 1992, a three-member boy group called Seo Taiji and Boys performed a rap song on a Korean-TV talent competition, to the horror of the judges, who ranked them last, and to the delight of the kids watching at home (one of the Boys was Yang Hyun-suk, the future founder of Y.G. Entertainment). Korean music historians generally cite this performance as the beginning of K-pop.

Lee founded S.M. in 1989. His first success was a Korean singer and hip-hop dancer named Hyun Jin-young, whose album came out in 1990. But, just as Jin-young was on the verge of stardom, he was arrested for drugs. Russell writes that Lee was “devastated” by this misfortune, and that the experience taught him the value of complete control over his artists: “He could not go through the endless promoting and developing a new artist only to have it crash and burn around him.”

In effect, Lee combined his ambitions as a music impresario with his training as an engineer to create the blueprint for what became the K-pop idol assembly line. His stars would be made, not born, according to a sophisticated system of artistic development that would make the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation. Lee called his system “cultural technology.” In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, “I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when S.M. decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.” He went on, “S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.”

In 1996, S.M. débuted its first idol group: a five-member boy band called H.O.T. (short for High-Five of Teenagers). It was followed by S.M.’s first girl group, S.E.S., after the given names of the three members (Sea, Eugene, and Shoo). Both groups were enormously popular in Korea, and inspired other groups. Soon K-pop was pushing both traditional trot and rock to the commercial margins of the Korean music scene.

In 1998, Lee began expanding into the rest of Asia. The idols sang in Japanese and Chinese, but the sound and style of the music and the videos adhered to the principles that had made them popular in Korea. Lee and his colleagues produced a manual of cultural technology—it’s known around S.M. as C.T.—that catalogued the steps necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries. The manual, which all S.M. employees are instructed to learn, explains when to bring in foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in what country; the precise color of eyeshadow a performer should wear in a particular country; the exact hand gestures he or she should make; and the camera angles to be used in the videos (a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree group shot to open the video, followed by a montage of individual closeups).

C.T. seemed to work. By the late nineties, H.O.T. was topping charts in China and Taiwan. Both H.O.T. and S.E.S. disbanded in the early two-thousands, but Lee’s follow-up acts proved to be even more popular. BoA, a solo female singer who made her début in 2000, became huge in Japan. Super Junior, the boy group, débuted in 2005, and became bigger throughout Asia than H.O.T. had been. And in 2007 came Girls’ Generation, the nine-member group that represented cultural technology in its highest form, designed to conquer not only Asia but the West as well. Nikkei, the Japanese business magazine, put the group on the cover in 2010, suggesting that Girls’ Generation was the next Samsung.

Neil Jacobson is a thirty-five-year-old executive in the A. & R. department at Interscope Records, one of Universal Music Group’s labels, who is in charge of making Girls’ Generation’s début American album. When I met him, in his large corner office at Interscope’s headquarters, in Santa Monica, he was dressed in jeans and a gray knit hoodie. Jacobson has unusually large eyes, and he has a habit of standing close and training his orbs on you, encouraging you to ponder the mind-boggling import of the point he is making.

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Jacobson said that he had met Chairman Lee in Hong Kong, and that they attended a Girls’ Generation show together. “It blew my mind how conceptual he is!” Jacobson exclaimed, giving me his wide-eyed look. “Every little thing is thought out. Every song is like a mini epic! And the fans—oh, my God!” He paused, slightly staggered by the memory.

Jacobson’s challenge is to put together an album that highlights the Girls’ Koreanness—the distinctive sweetness and purity that sets them apart from other pop acts—while making the music urban-sounding enough to get on the radio and be embraced by, say, Nicki Minaj or Rihanna, who could introduce the K-pop sound and style to their fans. The rapper and producer Swizz Beatz has spoken of wanting to pair Chris Brown with Y.G.’s BIGBANG, a five-member boy group, and Nicki Minaj with the agency’s other big success, 2NE1, a fashion-forward four-member girl group. “Bridging the gaps with collaborations can be the start of a global phenomenon,” he told the music magazine The Fader. But so far only PSY has come close to bridging the East-West pop-culture divide, and it remains to be seen whether his success will be a one-time phenomenon, like that of the other Asian star to reach the top of the U.S. charts singing in his or her native tongue, the Japanese crooner Kyu Sakamoto, whose song “Sukiyaki” topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963.

The directive to make a Girls’ Generation album for the U.S. market came from on high. Max Hole, an executive at Universal’s international division, told me, “I keep close tabs on what’s happening in Japan, so of course I was aware that Girls’ Generation had become monstrously huge there, and they do these amazing synchronized dances—a very visual act—and I thought the songs were great. So, at one of our meetings which the heads of all the North American divisions attended, I played Girls’ Generation for them. And Jimmy Iovine”—Interscope’s chairman—“said, ‘These are really good records.’ And the decision was made that we should try Girls’ Generation in America.”

Like everyone else in the record industry, Hole wants to do business in China, which one day will be the world’s biggest market. The question is when that will be. When I asked Hole, he said, “China is obviously a huge opportunity for us in five to ten years’ time.” He added, “Right now, the market is so small, but we make money on endorsements and touring.” Collaborating with S.M. on a U.S. record for Girls could lead to other collaborations in China, where S.M. is better connected than Universal.

“Granted, it’s a small bull’s-eye,” Hole went on, turning to the Girls’ chances in the U.S. “There isn’t much of a precedent for non-English-speaking acts in the States. Rammstein”—an industrial-metal band from Germany—“has done O.K., though now it’s mainly a touring act. There are some Spanish-speaking solo acts that do well, but there is very little precedent for a group that sings in another language. The Swedish groups like ABBA sang in English, even in Sweden.”

“Obviously, there are nine of them,” Neil Jacobson said of Girls’ Generation. “Getting Americans to accept nine girls isn’t going to be easy.” Western boy and girl groups rarely number more than five—One Direction, a five-member boy band from the U.K., is the latest group to conquer the U.S.—and marketers are at pains to emphasize the individuality of each member. But Girls’ Generation seems larger than the sum of its parts.

Touring, which the label is counting on the Girls to do, could also be a problem. In Korea, record promotion is built almost entirely around television appearances. During a weeklong stay in Seoul, I saw members of Girls’ Generation on TV every night. In the U.S., with the exception of awards shows, which are infrequent, there are few prime-time TV formats for promoting pop music; artists must rely on radio and concert tours to build a mass following. “The usual rule for English-speaking acts is that they are ten months touring here and in Europe and one month in Asia,” Jacobson said. “But these girls are ten months in Asia.” Product endorsements represent a significant portion of their income—the Girls have more than forty endorsement deals in Asia, from cell phones to roast chicken. An extended sojourn in the West would incur significant “opportunity costs,” as an agent at Y.G. put it to me, in the form of lost advertising revenue, and, worse still, in being absent from TV. The Wonder Girls, who used to be the biggest girl group in K-pop, spent two years in New York trying, unsuccessfully, to break into the American market, while they were eclipsed at home by Girls’ Generation. Several people I met at the agencies cited this as a cautionary tale.

“And I wouldn’t want them to just do New York, Chicago, L.A.,” Jacobson went on, pacing around his office. “I’d want them to go to Alabama and Missouri and Kansas. We need them to eat, breathe, and sleep this stuff. So that’s going to be an interesting negotiation.”

Ultimately, Jacobson faces the same conundrum as Lee Soo-man: how do you come up with music that appeals to both the East and the West, without alienating the fans of either? Jacobson said that he was commissioning hundreds of songs from a broad range of songwriters—Asian, American, and European—as more and more Western writers become aware of K-pop’s potential. “I don’t want to lose the Asian flavor. I want songs that speak to Girls’ Generation’s brand and also speak to the sound in America right now.”

Half an hour before the Anaheim show, I was backstage, on my way to meet Tiffany and Jessica, the two members of Girls’ Generation born and brought up in the U.S., who are both in their early twenties. An S.M. man was guiding me through the labyrinth of dressing rooms, where various idols, mainly guys, were having their hair fussed over and their outfits adjusted. There was a lot of nervous bowing. My minder hustled me along, telling me what questions not to ask the Girls. “Was it sad to say goodbye to your friends who didn’t make it?” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend?” He paused. “This is all going to Korea, and it’s a little different there,” he said. “So if we could stay away from the personal questions like boyfriends.”

I began by asking the pair about the challenges they had faced in adapting to Korean culture. “I thought I would be able to adjust, because my parents spoke Korean at home,” Tiffany said. “But I didn’t even imagine how different it would be. American culture is so open compared to Korean culture, which is really conservative. So I would be, like, ‘Hi!’ and they were, like, ‘You don’t say “Hi!” You bow!’ ”

And what were their living circumstances like now? Tiffany said, “Six of us live together, and the other three live like a minute away. So we’re always going back and forth to each other’s houses.”

Do netizens chronicle their movements on the Internet?

“Yeah, that’s true,” Jessica said. “I’ll be at a restaurant and it will be on Twitter in, like, ten minutes.”

“What’s it like living with that?” I asked.

“I think we’ve been brought up to be really careful and to take responsibility in our actions, in order to be in this position,” Tiffany said. She added, “We always stay at home.”

I mentioned a news item I had seen about how the Girls tried to disguise themselves in the streets of Seoul but that their limbs alone—the shape of their arms and legs—gave them away. Was that true?

“It is,” Tiffany said, shooting an accusatory glance at her arm. “It’s just so . . .” she paused, searching for the right thing to say. “Freakishly cool!”

From out in the arena came a long, low wailing sound—the screams of the fans, dying for the idols to appear.

“O.K., we have to go,” the S.M. man said.

But I did have one personal question for Tiffany. “Your eye smile: did you learn that or is it natural?”

As I was heading back toward the stage entrance, I came upon a circle of idols tightly bunched around a small man in a dark-blue suit. He was quietly giving some sort of exhortation; occasionally, he paused and the group would send up a shout. Moving a little closer, I recognized Lee Soo-man. I was struck by the rapt attentiveness with which his “family” hung on his every word. He was directing his remarks at EXO, his new Chinese-Korean group; all twelve members were present. With each shout, the twelve EXO boys bowed deeply from the waist.

Not all members of the S.M. family are as close to Chairman Lee. In recent years, several family members have sued the company over abusive treatment and so-called “slave contracts.” Perhaps the most notorious case is that of Han Geng, a Chinese-born, Mandarin-speaking dancer. S.M. discovered him in Beijing in 2001, and he débuted as a member of Super Junior in 2005. In 2009, he accused the company of, among other things, forcing him to sign a thirteen-year contract when he was eighteen; paying him only a fraction of the profits earned; fining him when he refused to do things the company asked him to do; and making him work for two years straight without a single day off, which Han claimed caused him to develop gastritis and kidney disease. The Korean courts ruled in Han’s favor, but shortly after the ruling he withdrew the suit. He has since left the group.

S.M. initially defended its long-term contracts by pointing to the costs of housing, feeding, and training recruits for five years or more, which can run into the millions of dollars. But the furor over “slave contracts” damaged S.M.’s reputation among netizens, and in recent years its contracts have become more equitable. Girls’ Generation’s members are rumored to have signed up for seven years each, with salaries of a million dollars a year, which can hardly be called exploitative.

Other agencies employing an S.M.-style factory system may be less progressive. In February, 2011, three members of KARA, a hugely popular girl group with D.S.P., one of the smaller agencies, filed a lawsuit claiming that, even though the group earned the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars, each member was paid only a hundred and forty dollars a month. The agency disputed that figure, and eventually the two sides settled. The onerous restrictions that some agencies place on idols have been widely publicized in Korea. Another small agency, Alpha Entertainment, forbids its female trainees to have boyfriends and bars any food or water after 7 P.M., according to the Straits Times, Singapore’s English-language newspaper. They are not allowed to go anywhere without supervision. When the paper asked the mother of Ferlyn, one of the Alpha trainees, how she felt about her daughter’s regimen, she replied, “What the girls have gone through so far has been quite reasonable. The company has invested a lot in them, so they need to work hard for the company. I am not worried about Ferlyn. I want her to follow her dreams and make it big.”

When an entertainment industry is young, the owners tend to have all the power. In the early days of the movie business, Hollywood studios locked up the talent in long-term contracts. In the record business, making millions off artists, many of whom ended up broke, used to be standard business practice. When you replicate the American entertainment business, and add the Confucian virtue of rigid respect for elders to the traditionally unequal relationship between artists and suits, the consequences can be nasty.

Ironically, for all the money that the agencies invest in idol-making, the success of PSY, the first Korean pop star to break out in the U.S., took place largely outside the factory system. PSY is with the Y.G. agency, but he has never been idol material. His first album, “PSY from the PSYcho World!,” was condemned for “inappropriate content,” and his second, “Ssa 2,” was banned for anyone under nineteen. In 2001, he was arrested and fined for smoking pot, and, during his mandatory military service, he neglected his duties and had to serve again. He’s a Korean pop star, but he’s not K-pop, and by satirizing standard K-pop tropes in “Gangnam Style,” PSY may have subverted K-pop’s chances of making it big in the West. At the very least, that a pudgy guy with a goofy dance can succeed where the most brilliantly engineered idol groups have not suggests that cultural technology can get you only so far.

The first group to take the stage in Anaheim was SHINee, a boy band. The boys were fun to watch—heavily made-up and moussed male androgynes doing strenuous rhythmic dances. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there is no way that a K-pop boy group will make it big in the States. The degree of artistic styling is much more Lady Gaga than Justin Bieber. Perhaps there is an audience of ten-to-twelve-year-old girls who could relate to these guys, but there’s a yawning cultural divide between One Direction, say, and SHINee.

Still, the fans loved SHINee, especially when the boys distributed themselves around catwalks set up above the aisles and began greeting audience members with winks and waves. Then the crowd sound turned from a baying into a sort of keening—I had never heard that exact tone at a show before.

I was watching the show from beside the stage when the nine members of Girls’ Generation came out, in bluejeans and white T-shirts, to perform “Gee.” The whole place shouted the hook: “Geegeegeegeebabybaby.” Whenever a song ended, the Girls deployed around the stage. At one point, Sooyoung came to where I was standing and began frantically winking and waving her way through the crowd, wearing a blissful smile and shaking her glossy hair. She was no longer the cold idol I had encountered in the press room but a super cheerleader. It was just as Jon Toth had said it would be: the Girls had come to see us.

But after the Girls left the stage the concert flagged a bit, and I found myself wondering why overproduced, derivative pop music, performed by second-tier singers, would appeal to a mass American audience, who can hear better performers doing more original material right here at home? The Girls’ strenuous efforts notwithstanding, the mythical mélange of East and West remained elusive.

I headed up to the arena’s Premium level, where Interscope had reserved a box. The woman running the elevator told me that she couldn’t remember hearing screaming this loud at a show. She had put in earplugs.

The box held Interscope people from the marketing and A. & R. departments. There were drinks and food—anything you want, Jacobson said, putting an arm around my shoulders and guiding me down to a seat in the front row of the box.

“Now, I am here purely as an observer,” he said, settling into the seat beside mine. “I just want to open my eyes and take all this in.”

Jacobson gestured around the arena. “O.K., notice no one is sitting down. No one. Even up in the rafters. So, obviously, there’s a connection there.” Connection, he explained, was the essence of pop music, according to his boss, Jimmy Iovine. “Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he said. “This whole business, it’s just about that connection. And, clearly, people feel that connection with the Girls.”

There were some covers: Jessica and her sister Krystal did Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” and Amber, the tomboy from f(x), Kris, from EXO-M, and Key, from SHINee, covered Far East Movement’s “Like a G6”—the only Asian precedent so far for the kind of pop-group success that Jacobson would like the Girls to have in America (even though all the members of Far East Movement were born in L.A. and grew up there). Acts came on and went off, changed costumes and came back on again. In between, we were treated to messages from the S.M. family. At one point, the crowd watched a slightly creepy video with cartoonish illustrations about the love that the S.M. family members feel for each other. Occasionally, the concert seemed like a giant pep rally. But at its best it elicited primal pop emotions that only a few of the greatest pop artists—the Beach Boys, the early Beatles, Phil Spector’s girl groups—can evoke: the feeling of pure love.

When the Girls came out again, Jacobson watched them closely. “O.K., it’s all about humility,” he said. “Look how they bow to their fans. That’s a big part of it.” He started ticking off the Girls’ qualities on his fingers. “First, beauty. Second, graciousness and humility. Third, dancing. And fourth, vocal. Also, brevity. Nothing lasts more than three and a half minutes. Let’s time it.” ♦

John Seabrook has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1989 and became a staff writer in 1993.